Patrick Hamilton - Hangover Square

Having finished my book allocation with some days to spare on this trip, I was forced into my reserve stock and came up with Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square - which coincidentally ends on the day that war was declared exactly seventy years ago. It's a grim tale in naturalistic mode of one man's hopeless obsession with an attractive but cruel slut - all set in the twilight world of daytime drinking and feckless living in bedsit land and seedy hotels around Earl's Court. You can see why it's been considered a minor classic of of quasi-bohemian low life - and like most tales from the school of Zolaesque misery it ends with a double murder and a suicide.